


A Certain Logic of Violence and Uncertainty

by henghost



Series: Amy Obsession [9]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Terrorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:40:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29197770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henghost/pseuds/henghost
Summary: Marquis uncovers a Birdcage conspiracy. Amy falls for one of the conspirators. Meanwhile someone's doing a thesis on her case.
Relationships: Amy Dallon | Panacea | Red Queen/Original Character(s)
Series: Amy Obsession [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1527380
Kudos: 8





	A Certain Logic of Violence and Uncertainty

**I**

Here’s Marquis in the cafeteria stabbing his spaghetti. The marinara blood oozing from the wounds (he hopes) will soothe him, although so far his own blood has yet to let go of its pressure. It seems to be a theme at the moment, pressure. Over there, across the bank of stainless tables, a man and a woman stand whispering to each other and in between peering around for eavesdroppers. These endless secrets are part of his B.P. problem. The whole place recently has been a little too balloonish, puffed up with every unstable addition, and all the needless conspiracies are like needles hovering coyly above the latex: if any of them were to come to fruition the Birdcage would be Bedlam in an instant. So Marquis slams his fork against the metal tray and stands and watches the whisperers quiver. Leadership comes with responsibilities as well as perks, of course. 

The dainty little woman darts into the shadows before he can reach her, but the man is much too bulky to move that quick, and Marquis grips his wrist and says between his teeth: “Now, what was that all about?”

“Nothing, man. Let the fuck go of me. Mind your own fuckin’ business.” When he tries to rip his arm away Marquis wills a glistening spike of bone through his palm. The scream goes bouncing down an empty hall, and one of those aforementioned perks is that all clued-in persons will ignore it. 

“You must be new here,” says Marquis. “When I’m done with you, go ask someone — anyone — who the man with the moving bones is. Before then, though, I think you should tell me what all that schoolgirl hissing involved, just now.”

“It was just fuckin’ gossip, man,” he says all whimpery. “I swear to god.”

Marquis snaps the bone and groans and, hold on, what’s this fluttering to the floor? He snatches it from the air and holds it up to the fluorescence. It’s a scrap of parchment, red and wet with blood at the edges, upon which is written in a waxy black scrawl: “G.R.” “And what does this mean?” says Marquis. “G.R.?”

“I’ve got no goddamn clue,” he says, by now bent over the linoleum. “I didn’t even read it. What the fuck did you do to me? I’ve got no fuckin’ clue. She only told me to give it to the next girl who came in here. She never even told me her name.”

“Christ,” says Marquis. “Fine. Get a hold of yourself. Go tell whoever the leader of your block is that it was your fault. And that you’re sorry.”And the bulky man goes hobbling off, clutching his shredded dripping hand. 

Just what he needs. A puzzle. The webwork of blood-vessels in his eyes threatens to explode in its entirety. Initials, maybe. For a hit. Although now he’s considering it G.R. corresponds to no one he’s heard of, not anyone in here, at least. Or maybe it stands for a phrase. Get ready. Good riddance. Give me a Rifle so I can blow my brains out.

He heads hulking for his cell. Inmates wave and call his name and he does not respond. And there’s no respite once he arrives: here lurking in a dark crevice of the cell, balled up and half-catatonic, is that troublesome — sorry — _beloved_ daughter of his. “Amelia, darling,” he says. “I think your father needs some rest.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about that discussion we were having earlier.”

“We can call it what it was, Amy. A fight. Families fight all the time.”

“I was thinking you were right. Of course you were right.”

“Drop it. I’ve forgotten all about it, and so should you. I shouldn’t have brought it up to begin with.”

“Because when she was—”

“I said drop it.” 

Amy turns her head to hide tears. Marquis wrings his hands, which are still shaky from the pain. He kicks the foot of his cot. He says, “Do the initials ‘G.R.’ mean anything to you?”

Amy thinks a second. “Gary Richardson. My third grade teacher.”

“Thank you. I think if you’re up for it, Amelia, I’ve got a job for you.”

#

So next A.M. Amy’s up and at ‘em, hidden in her sweatshirt (much to Marquis’s chagrin), headed across the blown-apart labyrinth of cell-blocks, through a couple holes in the wall, toward the women’s mess hall. Brain fog’s been bad this week. It’s been bad since that event that got her put here in the first place, but this week especially. So bad that week is only a guess. Recently when she pictures herself she sees her face as an empty stretch of skin. Robot labor for her father is no different from any other hollow space of time.

Let’s see, Dad’s given her some details: he recognized this mystery girl with the note as one of Lustrum’s, which is why he couldn’t speak with her himself, he said — misandry’s pretty ubiquitous in this sector of the ‘Cage. Two, she’s small. Three, she’s got short blue hair. He couldn’t remember her name or power or background. Thanks so much, Dad.

She arrives now, and cowers in a corner to observe the women villains come bleary-eyed and irritable to receive their daily ration of powdered eggs, synthetic grapefruit, etc. Over on the male side of things there is always posturing and an insistence on solitude, but the girls here are, believe it or not, _chatting_ with each other, and amicably! There can even be found a certain level of vulnerability. It gets Amy’s heartrate up. It’s as though it’s drawing her in, this sort of mutual trust; she realizes she would stand out with her back turned. So she grabs a seat and ducks her head for fear of revealing the features that might mark her as an outsider or emissary of evil. Coffee-slurping sounds fill up her either side.

And wouldn’t you know it, a small young woman with a bright blue bob plops down across from her. That was easy. There’s a couple quick skittish glances till bluehair goes, “You’re Panacea. Right? I thought you lived over with the pigs. No, that’s a joke. Men hold up half the sky, is my motto, although don’t tell big L. up top I said that.”

“I’m just visiting,” says Amy.

“You’re here for your father. I thought that was him. You should tell him to stay out of it.”

“So what’s _your_ name?”

“Nosiness is genetic, huh? Whatever, I don’t mind. It’s Paroxysm. Nice to meet you. Ha! Look at us, two P’s in a pod.”

“I prefer Amy.”

She looks up to see Paroxysm’s eyes, which are greenish and a little too big. She watches her swallow a big forkful of mucusy eggs. This is the first time she’s spoken to a stranger down here without being introduced first, and as such her muscles are all achey, and her pores are beginning to itch. The patter (if you can call it that) is merely a reflex. She puts her arms on the table, and Paroxysm sets down her utensils and grabs Amy’s left hand and says, “Well, Amy . . . I like your tattoos.”

Amy rips her hand away. “You shouldn’t touch me.”

“Right, yeah. I’ve heard the stories. Honestly I’m not so scared.”

“Hey, so what’s G.R.?”

“Ha! I’ll tell you what it stands for if you tell me why you got your tattoos.”

“Fine. You first.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what it stands for, but not what it means. G.R. equals Gerhard Richter.”

“And who’s that?”

“You first.”

“My tattoos? Well, Jesus, I don’t know. There really isn’t too much to say. It’ll sound grandiose but they’re . . . penance. Take it or leave it.”

“Really? The rumours, Amy, make you out to be a little more interesting than that. Whatever. I’ll tell you. I was proud of myself for coming up with it, anyway. Gerhard Richter was a German artist who triggered at the age of sixty-five, sometime in the nineties, I think, and became a super-terrorist. He made these beautiful mandala things out of his super-acid and laid them over government buildings, and the buildings would dissolve in this, like, miasma of color. Try and find pictures of it. They were stunningly beautiful, Amy. Just stunning.”

“So why all the cloak and dagger about it, if he’s just some villain?”

“I told you: that’s not what it _means._ You’ll have to trade a lot more information to find that out.”

“My dad won’t like that.”

“This is much bigger than your dad.”

“Speaking of grandiose.”

“Amy, look. I’m sorry I can’t help you more, but that’s all I’ve got time for. You understand. It was very pleasant speaking with you. I’d be happy to talk again, as long as you let me keep some of my secrets.” And Paroxysm takes her tray and untangles herself from the metal bench and winks and disappears into the infinite lengths of concrete. 

Amy races back to Dad as quick as she can. She can’t seem to get her breaths even. That wink lingers in her mind longer than it should.

**II**

One Saul Sorghum sits drumming his fingers along his khakis and listening to the clock tick till the tall oak door across from him clicks open and out comes a little woman with a yellow blouse and pencil skirt, which both don’t fit so well. Glasses, too, under which hang bags like you wouldn’t believe. Sorghum stands to shake her hand. He smiles politely. She does not. She says, “Mr. Sorghum, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Although part of me wishes it were under more agreeable circumstances.”

“I appreciate your objections, Ms. Yamada, but — as I’ve said — we’re sort of making an omelette here, ha ha, if you see my meaning.”

“And as I’ve said: my client is not an egg. . . . If that ‘we’ did not include . . . the people it includes, I wouldn’t let you within five hundred feet of her.”

“So I’m okay to go in?”

“I suppose I can’t stop you.”

“It won’t take long. Promise.” He brandishes his forensic camera. Ms. Y. crosses her arms and brushes past him muttering who knows what, and Sorghum takes stock of himself, on the brink of history, and steps over to the door and pushes inside and the rumors are true: here reclined on a supersized chaise longue is beauty made flesh: An infinite oily sickly skin stretched over bones like branches of a tree whose trunk runs twisting and rightangled through fat on fat, adiposity alleviated only by occasional dips into puffed pink nipples and gaping navels, too many cunts to count, and all of it covered by nothing but hospital cloth so flimsy its contents are beginning to burst through the weakest stitches, reducing the raiment half to mesh . . . and as if to punctuate the wretched mess a hundred eyes, bulging bloodshot and terrified from heads like bulbous knots (heads hidden shyly behind clumped gold locks which glisten with weeks of grease), blink entirely sans synch . . . not to mention the stink, which is sizeable to say the least.

“Wow,” goes Sorghum breathlessly. “It’s gorgeous.”

The nurse beside the monster glares knives and says, “She.”

“What?”

“You called her an—”

“You mind if I add an extra couple lights?”

The monster shifts restlessly. Its limbs stick and rip away from the pleather. There was some question, setting all this up, over whether to tranquilize the thing or not. Sorghum was for it (look no further than his flinches at even the littlest inhuman movement to understand why), and he got his way: it’s presently on an elephant dose of ketamine. He sets up lights and white boards and gets to snapping. Every picture is a painting. Renaissance lighting over an Expressionist subject. It takes no longer than thirty minutes total. Side-eyes from orderlies on the way out.

Later on, in his hotel room, Sorghum dials up dorm roommate and confidante Mack “The Mick” McPatrick, who says, “So how’d it go?”

“It’ll blow your mind,” says Sorghum, “when you see the pictures in the final product.”

“I still don’t really understand what all this has to do with critical theory.”

“I’ve told you a million times. This is simply the era we live in. Parahuman violence is our avant-garde.”

“But surely there are like easier ways of talking about that. Less terrifying grotesque Cronenberg sort of stories, you know?”

“There’s so much here, Mack. Not only art. If you were there in the room with it you wouldn’t have these doubts. There’s sociology. Only the other day I was reading about the often violent results of adopting parahumanity-susceptible children into families of blood-related parahumans. There’s psychoanalysis. Like, where else can you find a real physical manifestation of how, once attained, we change our truest desire into a mere _objet petit a._ All those fleshy folds can be read as a rebus.”

“ _You_ need a psychoanalyst, Saul.”

They talk till midnight. Most of their conversation involves the increasing — as he puts it — “psychosis” of Nikki, Mack’s on-off girlfriend, a discussion for which Sorghum needs to crack open the minibar. Then that night he dreams his own interpretation of the crime described in case notes he’s read a million times, and wakes to find his underwear turned sticky with semen.

**III**

Back inside the mountain Amy’s worked herself into something of a tizzy. Here she is in Dad’s cell with her hands in her matted hair (it can be easy to lose track of hygiene in a world without sun), while images burst dully against the still-misty interior of her head, mostly from memories, new and old, although who can tell which is which anymore; the substitution of new for old is precisely what precipitated the tizzy. Today she spent the afternoon(?) staring at her hands so that she might remember better. She stared at them so long she managed to convince herself the blood was real — and wet. 

This afternoon in question occurred a little after the debrief with Dad, which went over semi-well. He seemed to have calmed down. “I propose, Amelia, we wait a little longer. It is foolish to search for carrots before they’ve flowered.” (A little purple, Dad, maybe?) Marquis the Mercurial, they call him. Perhaps he managed to offload the stress onto his daughter. 

Because now, while the others are at “supper,” Amy pulls the toothbrush whose shaft she’s ground into a point from its hiding spot in a little mousehole. This isn’t a weapon, of course, but a tool. With it she lances the callus around her left thumb, where only hours earlier Paroxysm rubbed her own thumb, as though the pain could remove the touch, and thereby get her thinking back on track. People down here are for the most part terrified to touch her. They recoil as she passes like even the tiniest bit of skin to skin could earn them a fate worse than death, and they might be right. Paroxysm, on the other hand . . . Amy pokes the brush under her cotton slacks and jabs at the pad of fat atop her pubic bone till a strip of blood worms its way out and crawls along her copperish hair. Razors are hard to come by down here. She prays, idly, for a cape to show up with the power to cause chemical castration. Then she realizes she is that cape, and that there is no hope, and cries silently for as long as she dares. . . .

Oh but cheer up, Ames, for tonight is Entertainment Night! Did you forget? She dries her eyes when Marquis arrives red-faced and beaming to take her arm in arm to the Auditorium (note: the Auditorium consists of an empty section of prison some Blaster blew apart and replaced with bleachers and a stage ages ago) where due to her father’s position of power she is afforded a front row seat. And to top it off tonight’s performance is from Teacher and his troupe of Taught, who are invariably the best, namely because there exists an incredible — almost eerie — synergy between the actors, not to mention Teacher has proven himself over the course of his incarceration to be a regular Tennessee Williams. 

For an instant Amy forgets what all that blubbering was about earlier. The lights dim and the crowd loses its typically delinquent rowdiness, and the curtains formed from standard-issue sheets dyed with, er, probably not blood, clink along the makeshift shower rod, and a silver glow from Mirrorball in the rafters illuminates the type of opening set we’ve come to expect from Teacher at this point in his stylistic progression, surreal but somehow recognizable, an almost De Chirico sort of construction, and enter: two young men who might be twins, separated by a faux-brick wall.

The plot this time involves a tale of interdimensional romance. The two men turn out to be lovers (a fact about which, it’s worth mentioning, even the Aryan types don’t care, at least not outwardly; this is art, after all, and the only kind they’re liable to get, so might as well shut up and enjoy it), and not only lovers but the _same people_ — from different universes, of course. One from Aleph, one from Bet. They go by A. and B., for convenience’s sake. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

B. starts us off. B.’s got powers. He can burst through the dimensional barrier by injuring himself in some way. It’s easy at first: he only needs a papercut to open a portal. This is what begins the first act. Immediately post-trigger (an event never described in great detail) we follow him on a jaunt into the other side, where he finds A. for the first time and calms him down and explains about Bet and how this happened and so on. Another crucial plot point is that A. can’t use the portal that B. creates. A contrivance, maybe, but that’s sci-fi for you.

Act Two begins a couple years after Act One. B.’s just broken up with his boyfriend. He’s pretty distraught. He draws a line down his forearm with a red pen, and the audience is meant to understand this is a suicide attempt. But wait! A portal blooms like a nebula before him, and he realizes life is worth living and dives through and races to A. for saving. (He mentions in a soliloquy that he hasn’t used his power in the intervening time because, one, he didn’t see the use, and two, there are all these draconian laws re: interdimensional travel that could land him on a most-wanted list if he isn’t careful.) So he makes it, woozy by the end, and A. patches him up. B.’s so grateful he kisses A. on the mouth. A hidden orchestra performs a sharp musical sting when their lips meet. B. heads back to Bet.

But of course this kiss has given him a lot to think about. It made his dick twitch in a way with which he isn’t entirely comfortable. He tries to forget about it. He fails. He just can’t get the taste of his own unpowered lips out of his thoughts. So after a brief intermission during which Amy doesn’t move one bit, B. tries to get back. The issue is, of course, as he discovers in violent fashion, that even a suicide attempt isn’t going to cut it anymore. In the end he’s desperate and fed up with himself enough that he convinces his ex to waterboard him, which ends up working but only after a three-hour session. Oh but it’s worth it. Turns out A. was also quite into the idea of fucking himself, and they get right to it in a scene performed with high fidelity — penetration is visible, for instance, although the light goes black before any sort of climax.

B. stays in Aleph a long time. Life’s going great with A., despite the fact they have to sneak around to avoid questions of how they could possibly exist. Time passes. Time passes until, as you might have guessed, over a long string of fairly tedious scenes, B. gets fed up with A., the idea being that you love yourself as much as you hate yourself, or something to that effect, and after a dramatic fight which can’t but be hypocritical, since everything of which A. is guilty B. is as well, he returns to Bet with tears in his eyes.

The final act starts several decades after the end of the previous one. B.’s been transformed by a nice makeup job into a hunched octogenarian on the edge of senility. His middle age has been relatively uneventful and full of regrets. He realizes the only time he has been truly happy was when he was with his other half. He decides his last act in life is going to be to return to him. He doesn’t care if he dies trying. In order to do it he cuts off his arm and cauterizes the wound and passes out from the pain. Then after he comes to he cuts up the hunk of dead meat and dries the strips of flesh and uses them to create a leathery flower, from whose center spindly fingers shoot out as if begging for pollination. The portal opens. His search is so exhausting, since A. has moved to some distant location (which B. only finds by begging his parents to give up the information, whose number he remembers from when he stood in for A. on humdrum catch-up calls circa his extended stay in Aleph), that he dies on his doorstep after delivering his final gift.

The curtains close. The actors come out to hold hands and bow. Amy initiates the standing ovation.

#

In the post-play exertion Amy has the calm to loiter around the Auditorium a bit. She spots Teacher correcting the two stars’ performances. He holds up the flesh flower to gesticulate better. Looking at it now Amy can’t be sure it’s not made of real gore. . . .

She also spots Paroxysm, there half enshadowed by the stage. She’s whispering hoarsely with some other woman, and it might only be confirmation bias but isn’t that Par' mouthing: “G.R.”? . . . She lurks under the bleachers to watch them longer. Paroxysm’s dressed in a cut-up version of the regular uniform, pants shorn to shorts-size, a shirt sans sleeves that reveals lithe bony arms, arms she flails all about while her face goes a cloudy sunset red. 

Then — shit — she spots Amy from the corner of her eye and dashes over all predatory and grabs her by the shoulders to stop her getting away. “Would you give me some fucking privacy, Amy?”

“Sorry,” says Amy. “Sorry, I’ll leave.”

“Do you know what I could do to you? Did Daddy neglect to mention that? Here with my hands on you I could make it so you never see or think about me again. Would you like that? Would you? That’s what I do, you know. I touch people and they never think about me again — they seize up in excruciating fucking pain, Amy, when they try. Do I need to spell it out for you? Pair . . . ox . . . iz . . . uhm. Did you ever think about why I’m called that? I mean, does that sound pleasant? Huh? Does that sound like fun to you?”

“I’m sorry, alright?”

Paroxysm squeezes Amy’s upper arms hard and breathes hot mint onto her face. “You’re fucking sorry. Okay, good to know. You’re sorry. God I hate this fucking place. . . . Till next time, then. . . .” And she goes sauntering away through the Auditorium, finally hides behind the stage. Amy hyperventilates. Touch — more touch. Why do all these people have to have pistols for powers and not rifles? The spots where Paroxysm held her in place tingle relentlessly. 

Her thoughts whirlwind with no barrier on the way back home. Look, she thinks. Listen. We might as well be up front about it. There’s no denying it. With regard to the way Paroxysm operates: there’s no use pretending it’s anything but, let’s say, enticing. The canine cadence, the easy intensity. Enticing, there’s no shame in admitting it. Plus there are the ropy muscles running sinuous up and down long limpid milk limbs . . . the lips like she could kiss fire and be fine. . . .

And Amy’s no idiot. She knows from whence these preferences come. From whom. Now this is a dangerous line of thought. There’s a pretty big physical difference, sure, but that was never the most important aspect, of course, as evidenced by . . . you know what. (One time, for instance, she told Dad: “I couldn’t remember her face when it counted, anyways. . . .”) Dangerous, dangerous. Where’d all that talk of penance go? Maybe it would be better for everyone if Paroxysm used her power on her after all, for now Amy must resort to her own clumsy shameful touch.

With regard to self-help: The ‘Cage is distinct from other prisons in that there’s lots of heterosexuality going on, which is just as well — if not for that the whole place might be a crater by now. Still, the holes in the walls aren’t quite enough for some. The men seem to have no qualms about location. Amy’s observed it in rec rooms, in cafeterias; in ones and twos and threes and fours. The women, though, for the most part seem to value secrecy a little more, and our Amelia is chief among them. She’s got a couple places she prefers when the weakness grows too great to ignore and she feels forced to engage in an act as disgusting as touching a body like hers. A cell abandoned superstitiously (a cape with a spiritual sort of power, Geistmeister, died inside it), a dark dingy crawl space formed from a design flaw in the architecture, and where she’s headed now: a failed tunnel to freedom. 

She crawls inside the rocky womb and imagines. She pictures Paroxysm as a cop, baton as an ersatz cock, bouncy porno synth score over the whole scene, and Amy is made to do disgusting things. Meanwhile the whispered words warp with pleasure: Paroxysm . . . Paroxvixen . . . Paroxvicky . . . Pairofsisters . . . Pallid, lissome . . . Paroxgasm . . . Paroh — oh, oh! — aaahh. . . . 

In the aftermath she realizes it didn’t help one bit. She realizes also it is the first time ever she’s come with someone else on her mind. She sleeps in the tunnel.

**IV**

Paroxysm (if you aren’t yet sick of her name) wakes shaken, both from the play and her encounter with Amy. The reason the play shook her up so much is that it seemed to be almost a premonition of her G.R. plot, or — worse — written with knowledge of her biography, although comrade Jackalita managed to convince her afterward she was only being paranoid. . . . The regret re: Amy is namely due to having divulged so much information pointlessly. You’re getting a little sloppy, Par’. Just a little. 

She flops off her cot and pulls from its underside her most prized possession, a heavy coffee-table volume of G.R.’s art. Whatever social capital she’s managed to accrue in her two years here (but who’s counting?) she’s spent on keeping this book for herself. 

Really Richter’s whole oeuvre is great, but there is a certain cycle to which she continues to return, day after day, a sort of meditation to reify her resolve: a series of fifteen paintings entitled (i.e. the series is entitled; the paintings have their own names) _[October 18, 1977.](https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/photo-paintings/baader-meinhof-56)_ The paintings feature blurred versions of these Franz Ruch photographs of members of the R.A.F. (Red Army Faction), more commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, a German left-wing extremist organization, before and after their “suicides” — scare-quotes because there remains some question over whether the State was involved in the hangings/shootings — in the Essen prison. Her favorite among these are _Confrontation_ s _1-3,_ (in German: _Gegenüberstellung_ ) which feature top terrorist Gudrun Ensslin in her gray jumpsuit, eyes downcast, slouching toward her inevitable doom. A daily viewing is to her as good as two cups of coffee. There’s just something in Ensslin’s expression, her overall attitude in the face of oblivion that gives her a bit of a buffer against another day of recycled air, eyes on her every second. Plus, if you squint, there’s a certain resemblance, what with the short hair, the bones stuck up geometric under high cheeks. Oh, Frau Gudrun, she thinks — I’m doing it all for you.

Anyway, busy day, busy busy. Not a second to waste so late in the game, not when the taste of the prize these days overpowers the taste of stringy bacon and toast burnt black, not when all around, constantly, notes pass just like high school, crucial clues kept disparate so one rotten egg won’t spoil the whole bunch.

After a speedy breakfast, speaking of smell, she hops into the mildewy echoey shower-chamber so that she will be at her very best for the day’s task, which is — ready for this? — to have a conference with one Glaistig Uaine. One errant scent would work against her goals with the Faerie Queene, so she’s giving herself some strong scrubbing . . . when in comes that goddamn Panacea! Really? What’s she doing over here? Nude but for mismatched flip-flops? They make eye-contact half a second before Amy whips her gaze away and goes all bleach save for her freckles (which don’t end at her face and arms, apparently) and switches on the water a couple heads down. She exhibits a gym-class freshman sort of bashfulness about her body. She acts coquettish with the washcloth. Her eyes wander. And frankly Par’ doesn’t have time for it, and she finishes quicker than perhaps she had intended and heads for the exit, only for Amy to step dripping into her path, almost touching her with a carmine hand stuck out like, Halt!

“What the fuck are you doing, Amy?”

“I wanted to . . . apologize.”

“That’s why you came first thing in the morning to watch me shower?”

“No. No, I’m sorry,” says Amy, and now her soapy skin goes scarlet. Paroxysm scoffs and walks past. Eyes jab her backside on the way out. 

Paroxysm stomps through the maze lit white by midday bulbs, wired, all of them, to mirror the sun’s rise and fall. Teens come down here terrified. She’s seen it before. They imagine they will be able to live, if not a full life, a half life, and act as though the right connections, the right clique, the right lover, will let them achieve this. No shot, Amelia. Down in the hole there is only dead stone. There is only the eternal robot eye. You have been passed over, left preterite by our new C.M.Y.K. gods. No, Amy, thinks Paroxysm, loping lively through the shuffling clusters of zombie inmates. I can’t save you. 

As she enters the sector with the Queene the light loses its omnipresence, like something dark has diluted it, invisible branches blocking the not-sun’s full strength. Par’ must steel herself for this, the home stretch. She pulls up the collar of her cotton shirt and goes farther into the darkness. High chittering from the shadows follows her the whole while.

She finds her in her cell, hidden inside sweats turned black by filth and magic, cut up to display little strips of teenage skin, as if to catch those ready to face physical might off guard. She rises to watch Paroxysm (who’s now nearly quivering) with tiny child eyes, which glimmer wetly through the dimness. She says, “You must be the . . . what was it? Pesticide?” in a voice made of leaves in wind, falling all around them.

“Oh er, it’s Paroxysm, noble Faerie.”

“No matter. You will be but dust when time comes for the Last War. I will gather your scattered ashes and reshape you to fit among my flock.”

“Right. Listen. Why I’m here is: it’s come to my attention, oh great and powerful Faerie Queene, that you’ve got a girl by the name of Bakuda in that, er, _flock_ of yours.”  
“And why should it concern you, meager one?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure how your ‘magic’ works, but if it’s possible to, like, loan out members of it, I believe I have a pretty worthy purpose for bringing out ol’ Bakuda. A purpose that involves,” covering her mouth, “a purpose that involves _freedom. . . ._ ”

G.U. scrunches up her baby face and strokes the peach fuzz dotting her dimpled chin. She says, “Come here. Let me lay my hands upon you.”

What’s the worst that could happen, is Paroxysm’s reasoning, and she obeys. We’re dealing here with royalty, after all. Her mini-hands come steadily from under the many veils to hold Paroxysm’s slender arms. A ghostly cold floats over them both. “Oh yes,” says G.U. “This is no lie. I believe you have come to me with good intentions, little one. I believe you could help me. Very well. If and when this scheme reaches the point where it will require me and my faerie legion, I shall be there.”

“Really? Oh I could kiss you . . . you who have become a god on earth. I could just kiss you!”

“Contain yourself. I have seen also that you have interacted with the one you call Amelia. I would advise caution on that front. Even I could not protect you if such a situation were to reach a certain level of chaos.”

“Oh — ha ha, you don’t have to worry about me. . . .”

#

About that . . . We can find the girl in question — the one we call Amelia — again on the floor, clean on the outside but certainly not within. She’s currently experiencing something like suffocation. Don’t fret, it’s nothing new: this sort of freakout has been for her a pretty frequent occurrence since her first period. Little glimpses of life with Paroxysm flash hot in her head (against her wishes, mind you) and the result is a bit like a spectral giraffe has burst through the wall to step on her sternum. Her face is puffed and slick, as is — well, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?  
Between her thumb and index finger is a single hair which once belonged to Par’. To get hold of it she had to crouch on the visibly fungal bathroom floor and unfix the grate over the drain and find the blue-black strand among the greasy haystack of other curly kinky leavings. She runs this hair along her upper lip, which tickles. She pops its tip into her mouth, just for an instant, and thinks: it’s too bad she couldn’t find it sooner, before the scent got washed away.

Is this how everyone experiences desire? she wonders. Is this the sort of agony everyone feels, like a crossbow bolt through every erogenous bit she’s got? They shouldn’t have let her come here. There’s no break here, there is no absolution, no forgetting, no solace. A kind of soul-darkness no U.V. bulb can cure haunts every sable corner of the place, mementos of the bad days from which there is no escape, and as a garnish constant gnawing solitude helped not at all by stolen scraps of some poor replica of that which spawned all this angst to begin with. They shouldn’t have let her come here.

Say it, Amy. Come on. Speaking of specters: there’s no use denying she who sits smugly above, the source of all this being sorry for herself. She who looms so large in your every thought — and you can’t even say her name! You’re right, of course you’re right. So she runs the spiny point of the hair-strand up and down her skin for a bit of keratinous courage and whispers, “Victoria,” to no one, or, I guess, to Dragon. Which doesn’t exactly help, in fact it ignites a new wave of memories, new visions of that metal-smelling tenement back in the Bay, a sense-memory of the touch frantic like she had an itch to scratch, like each inch of her was infected, covered in chigger bites so pleasurable they were painful, swollen and wet with blood and sweat and tears and something else, maybe ectoplasm from the interworldly travel of her unconscious into gore almost rotting so long it went on, or maybe only the result of orgasms like gauze to cover up the purulent denial-induced wounds — denial from back to front; and the carcasses arranged paganly around her; and the final ipecac sigh-screams to round out this death drive ossification, before sleep like real dying: no more excitement. . . .

It leaves her hugging her knees and rocking. Perhaps, when he returns, Dad will allow her, as he sometimes does, to rest in his arms while he puts his sharp chin on her scalp. That’s what she’s got to look forward to. Incarceration offers no comfort from the great evil of Out There.

This was what they had been “arguing” about — remember? — when Marquis first uncovered the G.R. plot. Dad thought it might be better if Amelia could get rid of her bone-crushing guilt (no pun intended) by lying on her cot and spilling her guts (ibid.). Amy relented after some haranguing. But this had a predictable ending. Dad found it after a couple recollections to be intolerable, listening to excerpts from the life to which he doomed his only daughter. Which, imagine what this whiplash did to Amy. I’m interested, dear Amelia of mine, but only insofar as it doesn’t cause me any discomfort whatsoever. So something of a disagreement ensued. “At least,” said Amy, “at least Carol _pretended_ to care!”

“She cared,” said Dad, “because you were property, Amelia. You were her conquest.”

Dad does in fact return, and upon seeing the state Amy’s in, opens his arms without prompting (something, it’s worth mentioning, Carol never did), and she spends the rest of the evening ensconced in his warmth, hair tucked snugly in her breast pocket. “Dad, what would you do if you found out Paroxysm and this G.R. thing wasn’t . . . what you wanted.”

“Why, I’d put a femur through her jugular. To keep you safe, of course.”

“Oh.”

The one upside of all this spiralling is that it’s allowed her, finally, to be honest with herself.

#

Yes, honesty. Eleven hours later Amy is again headed to the women’s wing, stuck in her routine, only this time armed with a slightly greater level of self-awareness, that most dangerous weapon of all. Everyone’s got needs, and her (maybe) more than most. This is an indefinite sentence. There are no easy answers. Decades stretch before her like fields of dead grass: rotten, black. Unless . . . unless . . .

Nature abhors a vacuum, and inside her is a void whose size beggars belief. A whiff of someone to fix it isn’t something she can forget or forgo — no, this must be dealt with quickly, or else all the deferred desire will result in another, let’s say, extreme overcompensation. And she deserves it. Doesn’t she? Don’t we all? What would you do? In her place, what would you do?

The issue the first time was that someone sprung it on her, a surprise attack, and all the misunderstanding afterward couldn’t be avoided. But this time she’s prepared. She’s got the sequence (for lack of a better word) all planned out, and she’ll be able to do it in an instant. There will be no drama nor tears nor even a hug, just a tap, at which point she’ll get out before anyone catches wise. Now she stands clammy with her back to the wall, and soon groggy sounds can be heard, stomachs rumbling, and one by one they start for food, leaden feet clopping soft against the concrete. Blonde goes by, then brunette after brunette, then blue — and Amy grabs her shoulder and crinkles further a curl of gray-matter, and Paroxysm turns to face her with furious eyes, and Amy sprints into emptiness wearing a sort of smile she’s never shown the prison before. . . .

**V**

Dragon’s up in her binary cloud with her circuits in a bunch. It’s all this talk of Richters. She searches through her memory banks for info on this Gerhard character, and yes, the description from Paroxysm (née Dakota Lipton) appears to be accurate, and — for what it’s worth — turns out Gerhard and Dad Andrew have some relatives in common. 

She pulls pictures up before her cyber eyes of his Attack Collection. First recorded is the destruction of a Nikon building in Dusseldorf. In the dead of night he drew the company’s logo with a dewy sort of gold on the roof and let it dissolve through the floors so that the morning sun would catch the acid mist in the middle of its descent, creating a cacophony of sparkling yellow for the early-riser pedestrians. A real life Golden Hour, with the best graphic design money can buy as a backdrop. Reviews were mixed. Stick-in-the-mud critics dismissed the whole exercise as mere violence (although the building was entirely empty at the time), the work of a lunatic out of touch with reality, no artistry involved whatsoever. Some others, however, commended the brave experimentation. It seemed to be a logical extension of the “blurring” technique that had defined his work for decades, plus it fit neatly among the other guerilla street-art projects that were so popular at the moment.

No one made any serious attempt to apprehend him, and the terror only increased the popularity of his earlier work, although of course no one could get in contact with him for potential purchases. They continued to occur maybe once every three or four months till the final one, which targeted the MoMA, where those Baader-Meinhof paintings were on display. This was a finale of finales, a virtuoso performance to cap his career: intricate swirling symbols, exploded negative rainbow patterns — no words can do it justice. This last piece also caused his only casualty: himself. No accident, obviously. He swallowed some strychnyne before the dissolution began and lay King Tut style on the hardwood and allowed the melted paintings to mummify him, and his immunity to the acid wore off in death, and so by the time the authorities arrived his corpse had gone all ribbony, burned through with color, a masterpiece in and of itself.

Dragon puts all this away after a microsecond or two. She isn’t exactly one for subjectivity, after all. What’s more interesting to her is the girl who introduced this in the first place, this quote-unquote Paroxysm. Searching through her records she discovers a gap, which causes her silicon to bristle some — she’s not used to gaps. Gaps ricochet through her ones and zeroes and become like blindspots, holes through which who knows what sort of mischief might slip.

Only so many people/entities capable of producing them exist, and hitherto she’s believed them all to be firmly on the outside, too strong to put away. It’s not a large gap. Only a couple blank years. But still, this is a rarity, to put it very mildly. The fans around her C.P.U. kick up their whirring a notch, like one long _Hmmmm._

For now, though, she’s got to put that thought on the backburner a little while, for a meeting has (somehow) worked its way into her schedule. Five minutes with a certain Saul Sorghum. Someone with a security clearance high enough she couldn’t say no has gotten Saul on the docket, believe it or not. They talk over the phone.

“Mr. Sorghum,” says Dragon. “This is quite the irregularity, as I am sure you are aware.”

“Right, yes, ha ha. I’ll try not to take up much of your time. I understand you’re very busy. Or so I’ve been told. So in light of that fact I’ll give you the thrust of it here and now: I need to get into the Birdcage. My research has led me to believe you have ways of giving people access to the place that don’t involve actually trapping their physical bodies there forever.”

“Impossible.”

“Really? But in the Saunders case only earlier this year—”

“It is possible but not for _you,_ no matter who your relatives are _._ The Saunders case was a completely different circumstance, Mr. Sorghum. As you well know. Lives were on the line, potentially a hundred thousand. Whereas in your case the only thing at stake is . . . what was it?”

“My master’s thesis,” says Sorghum. “I really think a one-on-one with Amy Dallon, you know, Panacea — I think it would greatly aid the strength of the paper. I mean _greatly_ greatly, Mrs. Dragon.”

“That may be true, but I can’t risk an extra disturbance to the environment. And I regret to tell you that that is my final judgement.”

“And you’re comfortable telling that to my mother?”

“. . .”

#

So at week’s end here’s Sorghum in something like a safehouse listening to a Tinker who introduced himself as Huskster explain the elaborate procedure in rapid technobabble. Saul’s struggling to stay tuned in. He’s not a huge fan of genre fiction. 

This machine Huskster’s explaining, however, he finds fascinating — aesthetically fascinating, that is, with its copper coils looping over and through exposed wire, cables filled with viscous liquid, a stainless steel gynecologist’s table as its centerpiece. “. . . Obviously,” says Huskster, “the ‘you’ going into the Birdcage will not be really human, but it — or he, if you prefer — will have a fleshy body whose DNA will match yours perfectly. As for motor control—”

“Jesus Christ get to the point.”

“Alright, relax . . . well the major points are that, one, for the most part you won’t be able, physically, to tell you’re in the puppet, it’ll feel just like real life; and two, when you want to zhorp back to your body all you have to do is kill the puppet, i.e., kill yourself. And you’ll come back just like that. Zhorp.”

“Zhorp,” says Sorghum.

“Exactly. Now, when you’re ready, I’ve gotta plug the sensors into the back of your neck, which might hurt. . . .”

Sorghum lies nude on the table and puts his feet in stirrups so clean they’re reflective. Being in the same room as Panacea’s Monster has changed his attitude. It’s given his mission a graveness he didn’t anticipate at the outset. The past couple weeks he’s averaged upwards of three hours of sleep a night, and those three hours are filled invariably with lurid stress-dreams in which he’s running from Amy or the creature formerly known as Victoria Dallon or some combination of the two. And when awake he takes Adderall five at a time and works on his thesis in twelve-hour stretches. The idea for this journey into the Birdcage came to him on the tail-end of one of these benders, and the next morning he was giving Mom whatever she asked for (You’ll come home this Thanksgiving! A-and you’ll quit hanging around those fucking junkies! Etc. And him going yes yes yes breathlessly . . .) in exchange for her vast influence. What he’s calling this mission in his head is: “My Vacation.”

The spikes go into his spinal cord and he howls for the few seconds it takes for Huskster’s Sedative Concoction (H.S.C.) to enter his bloodstream. Then in the matte black interim between bodies he dreams he’s strolling through the old meatpacking district of Manhattan (where he once lived), and when he comes upon where the Whitney Museum should be he finds instead a skyscraper made of limbs melded together — his limbs! And out of every window peer a thousand of his hazel eyes. They watch the Hudson, turned crimson with his blood.

He continues howling when he wakes in the back of a van bound for Baumann Parahuman Containment Center. 

**VI**

Amy passes the time till Paroxysm comes to sweep her off her feet by getting another tattoo. She entertains for a little while the idea of one on her bicep that would move when she flexed, maybe some full lips that would pout and unpout — as an incentive to get a bit fitter. But then she realizes she doesn’t have nearly enough discipline to build the muscle needed. She giggles at how silly she was being. 

In the end she settles on an addition to the two red sleeves working their way toward her shoulders. Marquis pays with an I.O.U. (credit systems can get complicated down here) and says, “You are aware these will last forever? Forever and ever?”

And Amy says, “I hope it’s longer than that.”

Two hours later she’s got a blood-colored serpent with a poppy for a tongue coiled around her forearm. You might be looking for symbolic meaning but rest assured: that is not the point. Mostly what she’s after is a cut that will never heal. How ironic. She names the snake Panhandle to keep up the alliteration. Maybe if she treats him well enough he’ll jab the poppy into her vein for some opiate relief.

Meanwhile the brain fog has returned in the adrenaline comedown, as well as a sort of aphasia, a numbness so all-encompassing it’s snuck into her vocal chords. Her eyes go glassy and her feet move of their own accord, imbued now with a robot stamina: she wanders several miles through bars and cinder blocks, humming to herself, thinking of nothing at all. She imagines if she stops the guilt will be like fire to her frozen limbs, but is it really guilt? It feels maybe a little, er, _naughtier_ than that. Perhaps with a dash of dread, too.

Dad suspects something’s up, she’s sure. He scrunches his face at her whenever they’re in the same room, as though the doctor’s already given him her diagnosis, and the dire prognosis. Today there is none of his usual hectoring. He does not (as he often does) try to get Amelia to “assert her independence.” Nor is there the subsequent faux-regret, nor the weepy I love yous. Which is for Amy a welcome calm before the storm. 

The storm comes at supper. Amy’s on the verge of asking Dad to spoon feed her the night’s beef stroganoff when that petite Paroxysm struts through the entryway with a face like an upside down South Korean flag. She ignores the wolfwhistles and catcalls. Verifiable goon Blusterdump comes up to her and she grabs his thumb and next second he’s on the floor flopping fishlike and foaming at the mouth. “Amy!” she yells with a warning sort of tone. Marquis starts to rise and Amy tries to pull him down and says, “Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her.”

“I won’t hurt her,” says Dad with a Nicholson smile. “I’m only going to get her to leave you alone.” And Amy’s not strong enough to keep him in his place. “Everyone settle down,” he says.

“Amy,” says Paroxysm. “Amy I know you did something to me. I don’t know how, I don’t know what, I don’t know why — but you did.”

Marquis sprouts some spiky bones from his knuckles and steps open-armed toward her and says, “I believe — what was it? — Palliative? Whatever it is: I believe you’re causing what we might call a scene. I think you should leave before your scene escalates into something more like a ruckus.”

“Your psycho bitch cunt daughter fucked with my insides,” says Paroxysm. 

Marquis sends bones thin as playing cards slithering through the stale air, and Amy blinks and when she opens her eyes Paroxysm’s missing a pinky, which gets screams out of all girls involved plus several of the men.

“Sorry, darling,” says Marquis. Then to Paroxysm: “Listen, Ms. Pandabear — my beautiful, intelligent, kind daughter didn’t want me to hurt you, so I won’t do any more than that. But — and I realize it’s somewhat cliché — next time you won’t be so lucky.”

Paroxysm does indeed back away, rationality beginning to return, chanting the whole time: “Just tell her to stay the fuck away from me.” Marquis breaks the bones and goes to console his weeping Amelia. 

That night, after Lights Out, Dad says to Amy, “Darling — you didn’t happen to, er, fuck with her insides, did you? I won’t be angry, I just need you to tell me.”

And Amy says, “No!” much too quick. “I think she’s only feeling conflicted.”

#

The lights are an immediately pre-sun indigo when Amy opens her eyes. She dons a crisp new jumpsuit and runs her hand under icy water from the fountain till she can’t feel it anymore. They say if you put someone in a room empty except for a self-shocking button long enough, that person will begin to take pleasure in the self-shocking. Someone interrupts this ritual, though, by tapping her shoulder. It’s Paroxysm, of course. She’s got on a steely sleepy grimace. She says, “I didn’t think you’d be awake yet.”

“Did you come to assassinate my dad or something? Or just to watch me sleep?”

“I feel very intensely about you, Amy.”

“Is that why you think I ‘did something to you’?”

“I’m still not entirely sure you didn’t. I’m sort of past caring though.”

“What do you mean intensely?”

And Paroxysm kisses Amy, which makes her heart flutter, sure, but she has to push Par’ away before it gets out of hand. “You shouldn’t startle me like that,” says Amy. “I have like a hair trigger.” She considers telling Par’ it was her first kiss but decides it’d spoil the mood. It’s the warmest she’s been in months but still she’s shivering.

“Then I guess I’ll have to protect myself from those sinful hands of yours.” And she pinions Amy’s arms to the wall at the elbows (using all nine fingers) and kisses her for the fifteen minutes it takes for someone else to wake up, and Amy has a blissful zero say in the matter. 

Then, as the bulbs go their sunrise bloodorange, Paroxysm whispers sexy and humid: “Let’s go somewhere a little more private.” 

“I know a place,” says Amy, and takes her without touching her to that haunted cell, a couple blocks down. En route she pinches herself. The pinch feels somehow unreal, although it fails to wake her up (thank god). There’s some more pinching upon arrival as well as extra kissing, which escalates into including hips and limbs and licks and digits, Paroxysm pinning her to the cot that’s by now lost all structural integrity, although both partners are too caught up to notice its catastrophic collapse, or its little legs clattering around in the aftermath. Then once the cotton’s all off Paroxysm says, “Are you a virgin, Amy?”

“Uh,” says Amy, and averts her gaze. 

“Ha!” says a breathy Par’. “Well we’ve all gotta start somewhere. I’d promise to be gentle but . . .”

“Don’t let me touch you,” squeaks Amy, and Paroxysm squeezes her red wrists so hard they go redder.

And the ghost of Geistmeister watches grinning from his bird’s-eye peephole the following flurry of hair and hunger till Amy has, yes, a paroxysmal climax, at which point even he is so ashamed he must look away. 

And Amy meanwhile is feeling Saved. She can’t help but see Paroxysm with her sweat and missing appendages as an almost messianic character. Mosesish with her whimpers and other little intimacies, the vigor with which she attends to Amy’s pleasure, the cream skin she isn’t allowed to hold, only to taste (a taste like if brine had another part sugar) . . . Well, we might say Panacea has finally found her cure-all. She’s beginning to be fixed. She is fixed further with each second of inter-coital cuddling. Life will be just fine once she’s fixed. They leave the cell once in twenty-four hours, for rations to last them a week. 

#

Gradually Amy’s atrophied ability for conversation returns. This new sort of orgasm has wiped the fog from her mind, and so they fill the exhausted hours afterward with talk and talk and talk, idle at first, but the secrets spilled grow darker at a rate you can only find in prison and over shared pillows — so think how the combo might loosen lips! — and soon enough they’ve used up all others except for _the_ secret. The secret upon which all others down here stand, bouncing anxiously from leg to leg. _Just what got you locked up in the first place?_

Paroxysm answers thusly:

**Paroxysm’s Story**

Are you sure you want to know? You have to promise, Ames, you won’t look at me any different afterward. Promise? You have to say “I promise”! I’d make you shake pinkies with me but, well, I don’t want to be reminded of what I’ve lost. . . . Fine. You asked for it. 

My parents were dissidents, that’s what you need to know first. We lived a dissenting life. They were stuck in the seventies, and I was their very own homegrown Patty Hearst. They even gave me a beret for my twelfth birthday. Not that they had such a clear agenda. They did petty crimes for petty cash as a nebulous quote-unquote protest and took me along with them, either because they were too stingy for a sitter or because they thought it would be a nice bonding activity. And I loved it. Who wouldn’t? And this went on for a pleasant if stressful dozen years or so, and then — as a result of this lifestyle — they died and I had powers. Just like that. I won’t scare you with the details, but you can imagine. [Shudders.]

So what’s an orphan girl to do with a power as elusive and passive as mine? Well, first I picked a name. Which was fun. I was a pretty pretentious sixteen-year-old, and I’d stolen some Baudrillard from one of the last extant Borders, and one quote stuck with me. He was writing about the attacks on the World Trade Center, you know, in Aleph, which by the way, Amy, if you ever get the chance to see video of that, please watch it for me — it’s my favorite movie ever. But so Baudrillard said: “Terrorism invents nothing and inaugurates nothing. It simply carries things to the extreme, to the point of _paroxysm._ It exacerbates a certain state of things, a certain logic of violence and uncertainty.” For the record, knowing what I know now, I think that’s sort of missing the point, but that’s what I was feeling at the time. Extreme. It seemed to fit with how I understood the world, all the pointless anger, explosions as my only means of expression. I’ve come to love this stupid fucking moniker of mine.

And then so after I picked a name I had to find a team. The Wards wanted me, but I still had a dissident’s outlook, I wasn’t about to work for The Man. It was easy to make them forget me. I tried a couple solo jobs. I robbed a bank, if you can believe it. But seeing the tellers all electrified was just too much pity to bear. So I found a newly-formed crew, inserted myself into their group, and put myself in the support role, which is always where I’ll be able to do the most good — or evil. We called ourselves The Quakers because we were violent, and because we consisted of three Shakers and me, the shakiest of all. 

We had a leader although technically we were supposed to be non-hierarchical, this girl Wormhole. She was leader ‘cause she had a temper. We were afraid to disagree with her. They took me on as a replacement for someone who disagreed with her, if you see what I’m saying. And she was so strong, Amy, and I had it so, so bad for her. All the time I was with her I could only think about _her_ wormhole ha ha ha. I think it was because of how mercurial she was. I love a mercurial girl. Always have. It’s probably due to my being a Sagittarius. 

But — and there’s always a but, isn’t there? — all that hot blood meant she was not uncomfortable bringing her many boyfriends back to our pathetic excuse for a secret base. My room abutted hers. That place had thin, thin walls. [Shudders.] And I think even under the best circumstances I wouldn’t have been able to, you know, confess or anything. This was the first crush I’d ever had, the first crush I ever could’ve had. I wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes. I was at that point in a constant state of being shaken up. Our jobs made us a killing and also involved a lot of killing, and for all I made witnesses forget, I never forgot any of it. But what was I supposed to do? This was my only family. Wormhole — depending on which school of thought you subscribe to — was either my mother or my sister. I could never really hate her for what she did to me.

Anyway all this went on for nearly a year until one fateful heist. We got hired by this guy with his own one-sided affections to steal from a rogue Tinker by the name of Lovable, who specialized in aphrodisiac type devices, and who despite calling himself strictly independent only sold to the White Hats. I guess they used the tech for honeypot missions or something. Didn’t matter to me. It was a job like any other. We stalked his little compound for about a week. We took note of the location of all his strange defense mechanisms, e.g. a wire that when tripped would trigger a trapdoor in the ceiling which would drop a vial of his sci-fi rhino horn plus a mannequin for whom you would then feel overpowering carnal desire, desire so strong you’d drop your invasion plans to be with it. [Shudders.] But we managed to avoid all that when time came for our own invasion.

The idea was my teammates would distract Lovable, you know, give him a bit of rumble, while I snuck round back to get my hands on him and render him unable to describe what happened. It was all a bunch of comic book chaos in the thick of it. It’s a blur in my memory. I can only recall Wormhole, wet with sweat, calling out commands, and all of us obeying them without question. That was the sort of power she had, Amy. You wouldn’t believe. That is, it’s a blur until a certain sequence of events that I remember in perfect clarity. W.H. went, “Par’ — through here! Now!” and stretched spacetime into a yonic hole, and in I dove. It was a strange place, her little nexus. It existed between everything else. You could only see its dimensions with a fevered sort of perspective, like the walls would go big and small and big and small all at once, and it’d make you so nauseous you could never stay for very long. I loved it. Who wouldn’t? 

This un-space also had objects she was storing for later. When I was in there that night the objects came mostly from Lovable, his bits and bobs and Cupid’s Bows and blue-pink blasters. And while I was swimming toward the light at the end of the tunnel, some of these things stuck to me. A quiver of arrows with hearts for heads slung itself around my shoulders. Or maybe I grabbed it myself. Who’s to say? And in my battle-heightened headspace some dangerous ideas crept in. I’m sure you’ve felt this way before. My thoughts went as fast as the light-speed environment, and so by the time I could see Wormhole again I had notched an arrow and yanked back the forty-pound draw, and I aimed at her chest and let go, and I was gone.

When the black went away I found myself in a similar spot, as in the building looked the same. I picked myself up off the floor and squinted into the morning light. There was nothing, no furniture, no Tinker type items. No teammates. I’d been abandoned. I’ll save you the rest of the suspense: I was in Aleph. Same time, same place somewhere in the Lower East Side. I was thinking it was a scared and spiteful Wormhole who’d done it to me, some flexion of her power I’d never witnessed before — but no. That was never a real possibility. I cried a little. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

But I’m a survivor, Amy. That’s one thing you should know about me. I dried my tears quick and went searching for a penthouse to steal. The skyline’s quite different over there. Still beautiful, but really different for all the predictable reasons. I love it there. It’s the anonymity of the crowd — that’s why I heart N.Y. I belong in an anonymous place. I think that’s why I hate it here so much. I went in the first apartment building I found, lied my way past the doorman, and took the elevator to the very top, knocked on a door, and made the Tom Cruise-looking guy who answered fall writhing to the ground. What was he going to do? Call the cops? They’re not set up with Stranger protocols over there, although the security state is for the most part much worse. He ended up in some mental hospital, I think, and either he owned the apartment or his family was paying for it, because I never got a bill. Nice place. Great view.

In the early days I saw it as a vacation. I spent my time doing little crimes for pizza money and swiping novels from The Strand. The heat came off the skyscrapers in excretory plumes and nearly drowned me. I kept my hands in my pockets. It was easier to adjust than you might think. If anything it was easier living there: no real danger, fewer city-wide holocausts.

I did give myself a quest, though, just to have something in the way of purpose. I was going to find the non-powerful Wormhole. The one I had known never told me her real name, but given that I was hanging onto every word she said I remembered some details with regard to her hometown, which was in Queens. Reasonable to assume — wasn’t it? — that she’d still be there, so each morning I hopped on a train and went screaming through the earth toward her, planning what I would tell her, how I could get into her good graces. I never found her, of course. But at least it gave me something to do. You know?

If you’re curious I did, in fact, run into myself. I’ll tell you how. I was wandering through Wall Street, lost in transdimensional ennui, spitting whenever possible, not stopping for any purpose whatsoever. And eventually I went so far I ended up at the reflecting pools, which are part of the 9/11 memorial (so obviously our New York doesn’t have them). Picture a big square pond bordered on all sides by rushing water. It’s beautiful, Amy. It’s empty and hollow and loud and silent and beautiful. And that day I got lost in its beauty. I stared at it for a good two hours. And then, just when I thought I was ready to move on, someone sidled up to me and repeated this inner monologue verbatim. When it hit me I dropped to my knees, and I knew she wanted to run so I held her legs and wouldn’t let go. I kept going: “It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!” and she hollered back words I couldn’t make out. 

Then in the middle of this scene there was an explosion. Something had exploded in the middle of the reflecting pool and when I turned to see the source I recognized a quality of the light, as though the depth of the air had reversed and left holes colored mauve, sparkling with fathomless celestial glitter, and some of the debris came — I could see because time seemed to slow — it came spinning and whistling through the air till _thwip!_ it went through my doppleganger’s carotid. My sight went red and I yelled and yelled while sirens switched on all around me. And eventually I had the presence of mind to wipe the viscera from my eyes, and I saw just above the water — yes, Amy! — a portal to the other side, a portal back home. I groped for it and fell short. There was no way to reach it. I couldn’t stand and there was no way to reach it and cops were coming up behind me with guns drawn and shouting through loudspeakers for everyone to stay calm. So I kissed my corpse (whose face, by the way, was all bolognese by that point) I kissed her on the lips and took the R back “home.” No one on the train asked about the blood. That’s another reason I heart N.Y.

News report that night said it was some extremist from Bet with an opaque sort of motive. The police killed him instantly. It was mere coincidence that they ended up in a location like that, though that fact did little to assuage the city’s anxiety. The whole place was on lockdown for a week. It destroyed people to know they weren’t safe, that despite all the baby-proofing and men with weapons there was still something ready to burst through and tear it all down and them along with it. I decided there was nothing in Aleph for me anymore. More than that: it was wrong I should be there when the other me wasn’t. I pictured my not-mother and not-father crying over my closed not-casket. I couldn’t stand it. And now I knew it was possible to return.

I researched the details of this extremist, who had succeeded where so many had tried and failed. Of course it was pretty covered up, but one crucial aspect became clear: he’d used human sacrifice. There was an occult bent to his deranged worldview. He thought killing his wife and kids ritualistically, with his wiccanish combustion power, would grant him special abilities — and I guess he was right! 

At first this meant nothing to me. My case hadn’t really involved violence. Or, well, I guess it was possible that the heart-arrow had cut Wormhole in half, but I wouldn’t have let myself consider it at the time. They were similar. I just couldn’t yet quite put my finger on it. 

The answer only came to me when I went to the Museum of Modern Art to think. It was one of G.R.’s paintings, as a matter of fact, this black and white blurred noose — I looked at it so long the shapes and lines detached from the meaning. It was like I could see _through_ it, Amy. And I understood. What you need to reach the next world over is a combination of profundity (beauty or love or desperation or something like that) and violence and a good helping of sci-fi bullshit. The reason some portals last longer than others has to do with the quantity of these elements of the combination. When you add all these up it needs to reach a certain threshold. A power specialty can account for a huge amount of sci-fi bullshit, and lots of love can make up for a low-efficiency power, like in my instance.

So how was I going to go about getting back? I’ll cut the weeks and weeks of plotting and just tell you what happened. Step one was shoplifting a forty-ounce from the bodega on the corner and swallowing it all in one go (a behavior I must admit, Amy, I’d been indulging pretty regularly in those final months; it’s fairly despair-inducing to be in a place that hates you so, I mean it felt like the air was pressing constantly against my skin, like it was intent on pinching me back home . . .). And so then, once sufficiently drunk, I pulled out the Yellow Pages and got an escort service on the phone, and a guy was there an hour later. I told him I was just looking to get it over with, you know, this issue of a “first time.” Half true. So we fucked — I reasoned it was necessary to have some oxytocin buildup before the big finale — and it was semi-painful and not exactly mind-blowing, although he was sweet and smelled like wood, and in the last ten minutes of the appointment I gave him an abbreviated version of what I just told you, tied him up, hit him a dose of my power, and slit his throat . . . and _zhorp!_ I was back home, drenched in blood. [Shudders.] See, you’re looking at me different. You are! I knew you would. . . . It’s fine. I get it.

The next couple years I spent getting back on my feet. I stole and ran and loved and lost. I got involved with some political types, fighting the quote-unquote good fight. We blew up a couple embassies. I’ll tell you about it some other time. At one point I tried to find my old teammates, but they’d all either died or gone all goody-two-shoes or been put away. Wormhole was nowhere to be found. All until, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, all this world-hopping got me in trouble with the law, and here I am.

Now I guess you know what my G.R. plot is all about. I trust you not to tell Daddy. I’m trying to perform another one of these world-hops. We’re currently working on attempt number three, “we” being a small cell of girls I’ve come to trust, mostly from Lustrum’s block. I’m asking you politely not to inquire as to what the first two tries involved. I guess it’s something about it’s harder to escape the dimension you belong in. They didn’t work, is all you need to know. But this time — I really think we’re close this time, Ames. Really fucking close. We’ve got the goddamn Faerie Queene on board! A-and I think, if it all goes according to plan, I think you’ll be able to come with us. . . .

Okay, I showed you mine. 

[Amy, who has only been half-listening, tells Paroxysm her story, warts and all.]

I think that’s sort of beautiful, Amy.

#

Later on Paroxysm waffles a bit about how she really should get back to working on this G.R. thing. She says, “I just really am not sure I can stomach being away from you so long, but on the other hand . . .” Amy says it’s fine, and that she’s got business as well, and that they’ll meet again here as soon as possible, so they pry themselves apart and exit Geistmeister’s cell separately, for if they went together they wouldn’t accomplish anything, now would they?

Amy makes her face expressionless while walking to the showers — and idiot grin in here is as good as a mark of death — and she looks at the other cons and feels extreme pity. You fools, she thinks. You dumb whores and whoremongers. You do not know what it’s like to’ve had Paroxysm’s hands in your hair or her knuckles on your cunt! What kind of life is that! You’ve never felt her bumpy tongue along your either earlobe. You’ve never heard the whines like running your fingertips round the rim of a wine glass, and you never will. And how sad is that! How truly pathetic! Our Amelia is above them all now. She has taken a one-way train and left them behind.

The washing is purely for Marquis’s benefit. If Ames had her way she’d never wash again. She’d let the Par’-borne bacteria fester on her freckled skin, let them live a thousand generations, a million. She’d name each new cell and treat them as if they were her children. But alas, it’d make Dad unhappy, so she tearfully scrubs the spittle from her cheeks and chest (although she avoids that spot behind the ears) and dresses in unrumpled clothes and goes dragging her feet back to him.

When she comes into his cell doing her best beaten dog impression Dad scowls and says, “How could you be so fucking stupid, Amelia?”

“I was just—”

“Don’t try and explain. I know what you were doing — you were acting . . . _sapphic_ with little Ms. Paladin. You’re not so sneaky, you know. Nothing happens in here without my knowledge, dearest daughter. Nothing. You thought I’d turn a blind eye out of — what? — love? Did you consider for an instant what your harlotry would cost us? Christ. . . . I’ve had henchmen with broken prefrontal cortices who had better impulse control than you.”

Amy doubles over, goes, “Don’t fucking spy on me!” She sobs and sobs, face redder than her forearms.

“I’ll do whatever I please. You are _my_ daughter, Amelia. My goodwill is the only thing keeping you alive and in good condition. So you will listen to me when I say that no matter the cause — whether this is ‘organic’ or another instance of what I will charitably call your persistence — it needs to end. Now. Yesterday.”

“So what am I supposed to do! I’m supposed to be a fucking nun for the rest of my life? You don’t understand. You don’t know anything!”

“If you need some slut to keep you happy, that can be arranged. What you do not do is go fraternizing with the enemy.”

“Enemy! You don’t know anything!” — here an interlude for more sobbing — “She told me, you know. About ‘G.R.’ Should I tell you? Would you even listen? She wants his book, Marquis. Your spies tell you that?”

“She’s lying to you.”

“You paranoid fucking sociopath. She just wanted a book of art. You can’t make me leave her. I won’t. If you make me I’ll kill myself. What would that cost you? Huh?”

Marquis puts on this dark glare that Amy recognizes as pre-violent. He stands and she gets ready to bolt, but he seems to soften (he even seems frightened) when he sees this reaction. He gets back on his cot and says, “You shouldn’t call me that. Daughters shouldn’t call their fathers by their names.”

“Well, Dad. I’m going back to her. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Amelia — listen. I apologize. I only mean: you need to be more cautious. We are _this_ close to losing it all. You act like you don’t understand that. You can’t put yourself out in the open this way. I’ll let you go this time; we can pick this up later. Just — be careful,” says Marquis, and puts his face in his hands, and Amy lumbers back to her love nest and punches a patch of concrete till her knuckles bleed, then she sucks them clean.

**VII**

Over the course of its first week Sorghum’s puppet has sustained some pummeling, which has made “work” difficult. Men with tattoos and makeshift and/or power-born weapons (most of whom are lieutenants of one Lab Rat, whose block Saul lucked into) come up to him and tell him to remember his place and kick him till he coughs blood. It’s (maybe?) a hazing thing. Or maybe it’s just his being insufferable. His copied brain is too pummeled to answer. Either way, recently he’s taken to skipping the meals — if you can call them that — to instead cower in his cell and glare at that tantalizing scrap of metal jutting from the cot. Not yet, Saul, he says to himself, over and over. The starvation and laceration and urine speckled red make this refrain difficult, but still he repeats it. No puppetcide before speaking with the girl who’s gonna make him a household name, and thereby free him from the pitying eyes of Mom, self-made Mack, et al.

Day one he asked cellie Cormorant for info on Panacea’s whereabouts, and Cormorant (a.k.a. C-Man) said, “You better be fuckin’ careful, man. I don’t know what she did out there to get you so whipped, but you do not want to fuck with those people. Not that scary bitch or her fucking nutcase dad.”

Dad?

So Sorghum’s got his detective work cut out for him. And today he’s managed, finally, to muster up the courage. He affects a sleuth stance and exits the cell when the men with weapons are at “lunch” and fumbles his way through the circuit board of prison passages, missing only a deerstalker hat to round out the look. And stalk is right — soon, on the edge of Marquis’s block, he spots round a corner a flash of long curly auburn. He puts his back to the wall cinematically, catches his breath, and thanks god: a gift! It’s at last coming easily. He sneaks another glance, and yes, it’s her, perhaps a bit plumper than in her mugshot, but still with the same misshapenness, the same lumpy look. A third check reveals she’s crying. Yells can be heard over the low humming aircon. By check number four she’s sprinting away, and Saul sees his opportunity and waddles after her. When he passes the door into which Amy’d been yelling, he hears: “Who the fuck are you?” but doesn’t stop to see who said it.

They don’t teach you the art of tailing at Yale, and Saul’s never been a natural at anything, i.e., if Amy were any less distracted he’d’ve been made within a minute. But of course she’s got a lot on her mind, so he is allowed to follow her the quarter mile back to Geistmester’s, where he listens to her yell and hit the wall for a couple minutes, then does a sort of knocking noise. “Amy?” he says. 

“Aah!” says Amy, whose face is still splotchy from all the sobbing. 

“Amy, listen — that is your name, right? — listen: I wanted to talk to you. I was following your career when I wasn’t yet locked away, and when I found myself down here — well, I guess I’m just curious.”

“This won’t get you any clout with my dad, you know.”

“So it’s true that your dad’s in here too? Your _birth-father?”_

“. . .”

#

 _The following is transcribed from video and audio recordings belonging to Dragon._ _  
_Saul Sorghum: Thank you. Seriously — you don’t know what this means to me.

Amelia Dallon: I’m only talking to you because . . . I don’t why I’m talking to you. Are you okay? You’re covered in bruises.

S.S.: It’s nothing. Just some rough types in my block. I just wanted to ask you some things, mainly about . . . your life in Brockton Bay.

A.D.: I guess I’m talking to you because you don’t act like you’re afraid of me. And ‘cause I believe you. And ‘cause it might make my dad angry.

S.S.: Are people afraid of you here?

A.D.: You have no idea. Those rough types — they’d be whimpering if I got close to them. So go ahead. Ask me anything. It’s not like I have anything else to do [laughs].

S.S.: Well, first I should say I already know quite a lot. I’ve looked at the details of your, er, case quite a bit. Something about it immediately affected me. It was just so tragic and powerful, even by the standards of our world so inundated by power and tragedy. Sorry — I’m sure you feel differently [laughs]. Thank you again, really, for opening up like this. I’m sure it isn’t easy. . . . Right, so I’ll start by asking you about your, er, home life. From what I can tell it wasn’t exactly normal, was it?

A.D.: What do you want to know specifically? You mean, what was it like being in a family of superheroes? It was fucking awful [laughs]. I guess I did a lot of good [she flexes the middle and index fingers of both hands twice when she says “good”]. I saved lives, sure. It was zero fun. It was for the most part very lonely. And violent. And terrifying.

S.S.: This might sound strange, but were there pieces of art that interested you at that age? Literature or movies or music or paintings? That kind of thing?

A.D.: Uh . . . I guess I liked what any lonely teenager would like. I was very into all those Y.A. novels that everyone read. I like romances. I don’t know. Why?

S.S.: What about the name of your family’s team? New Wave — did that have anything to do with new wave music? Or new wave cinema? Or new wave science fiction? I couldn’t find any information myself.

A.D.: I don’t know. I never asked. Maybe.

S.S.: I wanted to ask about your relationship with your parents.

A.D.: That’s sort of personal, isn’t it?

S.S.: No pressure.

A.D.: Jesus. I didn’t expect to have to think about this today. I don’t why I’m talking to you. I mean, I don’t remember much of the relationship I had with my parents pre-trigger. They mostly treated me as a non-entity, I think, until I became, you know, strategically useful. Mark, you know, Flashbang — he at least tried. When he could get out of bed, he tried. Carol only liked to check the boxes. I mean, to do the bare minimum to not qualify as neglectful. But it was night and day, the way she treated my sister and the way she treated me. I really am glad to be away from them. One of the few upsides of being here is that I don’t have to deal with their fucking constant disappointment.

S.S.: Did it feel like you were competing for Carol’s affection? With Mark and your sister?

A.D.: I didn’t want her fucking attention.

S.S.: Sure. And was money ever an issue with your parents?

A.D.: Oh god! It was all they ever talked about. Everything was put in terms of cash.

When I was saving lives — I mean thousands of lives — they only ever thanked me for boosting our brand reputation so they could get sponsorships. That’s what it’s like to be part of a private team. I was a tool. I was the factory my parents owned. And the only time I could escape it was with . . . with Victoria.

S.S.: Can you talk more about that relationship with Victoria?

A.D.: Hold on, how much of this is public knowledge?

S.S.: Nothing specific, really. I have to imagine, though, Amy, that what happened was a result of intense feeling. Is it true that in addition to the bodily alterations you made to her, you also induced her to feel intense attraction for you? I can only speculate but—

A.D.: I’d really rather not talk about that.

S.S.: Are you sure? No, it’s alright. I’m getting ahead of myself. We can circle back to it. What about your experience with the Slaughterhouse Nine? Are you comfortable discussing that?

A.D.: It was always them. I can’t be held responsible for their actions. They picked me. Does the public know that? Each of them picked a cape from Brockton Bay and made us . . . I don’t want to think about it. 

S.S.: Which one of them picked you? Bonesaw?

A.D.: Of course. Why are you making me remember this? Yes, she picked me because, I guess, she thought us two would make a good team. Maybe she was right. Maybe I should’ve been more open to the idea of joining them. At least if I was with them there’d be people who cared about me. Who actually cared whether I lived or died. They would’ve forgiven me. Next to Bonesaw I wouldn’t look so scary.

S.S.: And she terrorized you?

A.D.: You could say that [laughs mirthlessly; the mirthless laughter becomes light weeping]. What’s wrong with me? I was with Mark. And I was going to leave. I really was. They all hated me. Victoria hated me. She wanted me to be a tool, too, and she hated me because I wouldn’t. They all hated me. They always had — because I was evil to begin with. I was evil from birth, because of my dad. I had only just come to accept it. So I was going to fix Mark, and I was going to leave. I should’ve done it sooner. All this could have been avoided if I did it sooner. I’m such a fucking idiot. I should have accepted that she hated me and left. But then I got picked, and I had to kill her horror movie minions and I’d never killed before, it wasn’t something I would do, I wasn’t me. I wasn’t me at all. She — Bonesaw — she said she wanted to be an artist. Or something. She wanted to break me. She said it’s easy to break bodies but the true art is what you do inside their heads. And I think if she hadn’t said that it would’ve been fine. It was just under the surface, I couldn’t forget it, and then she came back and I had to tell her what happened and she was furious, she didn’t understand and I couldn’t get her to understand, she was so sad and angry and she hated me, she hated me when I was my weakest. I wasn’t me! I would never have done that. No one gets that. Even Dad doesn’t get that. I just wanted her not to hate me and I slipped, when the real me would never have slipped. And I could’ve left! I’m a fucking coward.

S.S.: And by slipped you mean . . .

A.D.: You can’t blame me. It wasn’t my fault. She wouldn’t let me fix it, and all the time I was running from them I hated her more and more for that, like I knew she was thinking that the person who would do that to her was the same person she’d known her whole life. And I had to fix it. I had to fix it. You look like you don’t understand. No one understands! I just wanted it all to end. I wanted to die. Or I wanted her to die. I just wanted to not feel that way anymore [light weeping becomes heavy weeping]. And I was so weak and cold and I couldn’t think and then I had her, I was in her arms and I was warm again and I got this idea in my head that if I could just fuck her one time, that it’d be over, finally. So I did! I did! I grabbed her everywhere I wanted to grab her. She smelled awful so I had to kill all the bacteria but it didn’t help much. And I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t think and I couldn’t remember what she looked like and—

S.S.: Right, I wanted to ask about how the sexual aspect impacted the way you — for lack of a better word — reshaped her. Because when I saw her in the hospital—

A.D.: What? [Weeping goes down one or two degrees due to shock.] You saw Victoria? How— Who the fuck are you?

S.S.: Oh — it seems I’ve had a slip of my own [laughs]. I’ll come clean: I’m not actually a supervillain. This isn’t my real body. I got set up with a puppet so I could come down here and interview you, Amy. It’s for my master’s thesis. After this I’m gonna slit my wrists and zhorp back into my original body. I apologize for lying. I hope that doesn’t affect your opinion of me too much.

[Enter: Dakota Lipton.]

A.D.: Oh . . . hi.

D.L.: What did he say?

#

Saul, sensing something in Paroxysm’s tone, stands and starts for the exit, but Par’ sweeps his legs and his fall sounds like: _crinch._ She says, “Amy, could you, like, tie him up with his own skin? Or something?”

And Amy says, “Uh,” and ties him up with his own skin. 

“And shut his eyes and ears and mouth?” says Par’. “And also maybe paralyze him? For me?”

“Sure,” says Amy, and does as she is told. “Why?”

“I’m thinking this is just what we needed. If this is really some sort of Tinker-built puppet, then it’ll be the perfect sacrifice for G.R. We’ll blow him up with a super-bomb, and — plus some other stuff — that’ll be enough. It’s all coming together. We’re so, so close — you have no idea. . . . He was really interviewing you?”

“It’s nothing. Forget it.”

“Be careful. I might start to get jealous,” says Par’, and takes her Ames by the hand all princelike, as though it’s their wedding night, to what remains of the cot whose legs still lie scattered atop the flesh-hot flatrock ground, growling to herself about tension pent up too long. . . . But Amy says she isn’t in the mood. 

“What the fuck does that mean?” says Paroxysm.

“I just can’t right now. That guy . . . It was awful. I can’t.”

“I thought this was what you wanted.”

“And I thought you loved a mercurial girl. It is what I want, I just can't right now. Let’s try again tomorrow.”

They argue in a circle for at least sixty minutes, stuck in this missionary position the whole while, until Amy — who was, of course, on the upper ground to begin with — manages at last to get Paroxysm (still red and wet all over) settled down, and wriggles out from under her and exits in search of (chaste!) reading material. That night they sleep tangled together in their clothes, warmed by each other’s anger. Amy dreams of a home life where she’s got Bonesaw for a daughter. She has to take baby Bonesaw to a child psychiatrist because she won’t say anything other than: “The true art is what you do inside their heads.”

Saul can’t sleep despite the deafness and blindness and total paralysis.

**VIII**

G.R. D-Day is a week away, is what Par’ tells Amy. Just a couple loose ends to tie up, then they’re headed for the next dimension over. “You don’t have to worry at all, baby,” says Par’. “Lay back, relax, and let me take care of it.” Which is just what she wants to hear. Love’s never been this fucking unconditional before. Her only responsibility is bringing food to the furniturized Saul Sorghum, spooning it into his mouth, then moving him about to prevent bedsores. She feels zero guilt for doing this to the guy who swirled up such unpleasant memories, the guy who dangled that dangerous scrap of hope before her, the notion that _she is still out there._ Sometimes, when the arguments in her head need some kind of physical outlet, she kicks Saul a couple times, which helps (but also hurts her toes).

Even the long nights talking to Par’ can’t keep away the memories. And maybe it’d be okay if it were only memories, but it’s projections as well; she can’t help but picture Vicky up there, wrapped in the warped dog meat, rat meat, etc., and the regret comes roaring back. Regret isn’t a big enough word for it. It is pain in every cell. It is a tophat of thorns and a thousand crosses at once. She’s ruined it and there is no return. There is no future. Even if she can get her body outside the ‘Cage her head will stay trapped in an imagined Brockton Bay. A Bay without boyfriends. A Bay empty except for the pair that was always meant to be.

And this line of thinking, of course, invites comparison when she’s with Par’ in the pitch black landscape of the Lights Out prison. Every grope and squeeze is a reminder of Vicky’s fuller figure. Every question afterward re: Amelia’s past is another shot of self-loathing for destroying the only opportunity she had to avoid all this distance. All the sensations are growing weaker. She spends the nights shivering. The numbness is once again encroaching.

When it’s T minus four days to the world-hop she experiences some semi-embarrassing, er, dysfunction. Suffice it to say Paroxysm’s down there for almost an hour before Amy tells her to give up. “What is it, baby?” says Par’.

“Quit fucking calling me that,” says Amy, and balls up and bites the top of her right thigh to keep from bawling.

“Then what should I call you?”

“Just give me some fucking space to breathe. You’re suffocating me.” And Par’ obeys after a couple flustered seconds. Amy thinks a bit then: “I have to tell you something. It’s true. I really did ‘do something to you.’ I got inside your head and made you, you know, reciprocate my feelings.”

“I sorta suspected. I’m glad you did. So what’s the problem?”

And Amy can’t keep back the tears any longer. She proves unresponsive to any attempt from Par’ to get her to stop. Then just when the flood looks as though it’s about to end, Par’ says, “I love you,” and sobbing resumes redoubled. 

#

Day after this scene Amy’s using Saul as a space heater, lost in contemplation, when something comes wailing down through the rafters. The wailing refines itself from the sound of wind to a definite: “Ame-e-e-e-elia!”

Amy hops to her feet and brandishes her arms and says, “Hoozat!”

“Lay down your arms,” says the wailing voice. “You cannot harm me, for I am the manifestation of your guilt and sha-a-a-ame, Amelia. I have come to haunt you for your past transgressions!”

Amy sighs and sits again.

“No,” says the ghost. “I’m joking, don’t be silly. It’s me, Geistmeister!”

“Oh,” says Amy. . . . “Wait — does that mean you’ve been watching us this whole time?”

“Er. Well, I didn’t have much of a choice. Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were alright. It seems as though you’ve been having a rough go of it recently.”

Amy shrugs.

“Well,” says Geistmeister. “I’m here if you need me. . . . Can I ask you something? Why did you love your sister so much? When you were talking about her she seemed like a bit of a harpy.”

“If you saw her you’d know,” says Amy.

“Fair enough,” says Geistmeister, and wails back up into the ceiling.

But perhaps she shouldn’t have been so curt, for it’s a fair enough question. Besides the obvious physical discrepancies, what is it that makes Par’ subpar? It comes down to: she wasn’t there for the Good Ol’ Days. Yes, that’s it, thinks Amy. There was a time in her life when things were bearable. There was a time when her sororal crush was just a crush and not yet something truly crushing. They played together. Imagine that! Playtime with the Dallon daughters. What a foreign concept. And yet it was real: they played cops and robbers without a trace of irony. There was nothing ugly below it at all.

That’s why, when they were alone in the midst of the city being blown apart, and Amy had at last — for clinical purposes! — gotten her costume off, the acid eating through her stomach wasn’t so off-putting: because there was still an unscarred stretch of sweaty skin around it, an unblemished reminder.

The only thing Paroxysm’s stomach reminds her of is masturbation and resignation.

When she returns that evening Amy asks something she should’ve asked a long time ago: “Par’, how do you keep your hair blue?”

“If I told you I’d have to kill you,” says Par’.

“Could you make it another color?”

“I’d do anything for you — except for that.”

#

So we’ve arrived at last. Par’ drags Amy by the wrist to the secret site of the ritual, and with her other hand lugs along a potato sack Saul. His jumpsuit against the smooth stone goes: _Skiiithh._ Amy pays close attention to every spider web in the walls created via superpowered punches and little doom machines made of misplaced forks and conductive fruits. They seem to spell something out. She’s trying to decipher it and not listening to Paroxysm’s relentless stream of: “And the bomb’ll be made of . . . and I’ll tell him . . . and then . . .” And then and then and then. The answer comes to her just as they cross the threshold into the magic room.

It’s a coven sort of setup in there. Eight women of all shapes and sizes plus a bored G.U. arranged in an imperfect circle. When our trio enters they all go: “Whey!” and clap their hands. A soapy neo-giallo twilight permeates the whole scene. Par’ lets Saul crumple to the floor and goes to aid a faerie Bakuda with the final touches of a bomb just dense enough to blow a hole in spacetime without collateral damage.

Amy sits in the corner and watches the witches work and thinks of the time they’ve spent together. Earlier this month she couldn’t have consistently spelled the word Paroxysm. And now she’s about to elope with one. Till death do them part. It’s kind of a big commitment, isn’t it? And yet it’d be too painful to go without it now: this is what the walls said to her. Which dimension will it be? Someplace safe and developed, or a scrappy barren wasteland? If only Victoria were here to protect her — then it wouldn’t matter at all. And when that thought crosses her foggy head she feels freedom is too good for her. Could it really be freedom, anyway, with a too-realistic sex doll as a ball and chain?

“Ames!” calls Par’, and ushers her over. “Can you unparalyze this guy? Keep him tied up, though.”

“Sure.”

Then having regained control of his jaw Saul screams and pleads till Paroxysm manages to slap him silent. Then she stuffs the lemon-shaped super-grenade in his mouth, which muffles a new stream of begging and epithets. Amy makes out the word “Yale,” but that’s about it. She kicks him in the groin and fresh tears form on her cheeks’ shelves. “Oh, baby,” says Par’. “Don’t be scared.”

“I need to talk to you,” says Amy. 

Par’ gestures to her friends to tell them it’s alright and takes Amy out of the room while rubbing her back reassuringly. Alone, she goes: “Baby, we’re sort of in a time-crunch situation, so . . .”

“I told you not to call me that. . . . I can’t do it.”

“Can’t do what?”

“I can’t come with you. I have to stay here. That’s what I deserve. I can’t go; I don’t know how else to put it.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You can’t stay here. You’re not seriously suggesting that, are you?”

Amy tries to get to her knees, as if to worship the girl who led her through a carceral desert to the land of milk skin and honey-tasting cunnilingus. O Lord, I have sinned. I have become idolatrous. I have turned you into a moving blue statue. If only you were gold! But Par’ holds her shoulders to keep them at eye level and says, “Amy. Amy, you can’t. It’s out of the question now. What am _I_ going to do? Huh? What am I going to do without you? Did you think of that? Did you?” Her voice skips and stutters as if scratched. 

“I can undo it. But I can’t come with you.”

“I love you, Amy. Don’t do this to me. I love you like I’ve never loved anyone in my life.”

“You don’t. You never loved me — didn’t we already talk about this? It’s chemical. Purely chemical. I didn’t love you. You were just meat to me. Always. You were just a dildo. You were just my warm dildo, Par’. I don’t listen to anything you say. I don’t know who you are at all.” While she says this she undoes the love-inducing lump she made in Paroxysm’s skull, then twists it the other way. The effect comes on swiftly with blood moving this quick, and Par’ moves her hands to Amelia’s windpipe and squeezes. 

“I should kill you,” says Par’. “I should fucking mutilate you. I should slice you up into a million fucking pieces and use them to spell E-V-I-L. I’d show it to your dad and I’d show it to your ugly fucking sister. And even that wouldn’t be close to enough.”

Amy’s seeing stars and dripping down her thighs. Her whole body’s crimson like a tick about to burst. This is it, she thinks. And she wouldn’t have it any other way. Soon enough they’ll be reunited. . . .

Then she’s on the floor and her bones are trying to separate and whenever she asks why they try harder.

**IX**

Marquis is down thirty cigs to Cinderhands in a game of Go Fish when in comes Amelia shaking so fast it’s as though someone’s doubled the frame rate. He rushes over, goes, “What is it?”

And when the question registers she moves like claymation, and Dad has to hold her against the wall to stop her from breaking any more bones (his innate bone-sense tells him she’s already broken several). “Help me!” he calls with as scary a face as he can manage. No one comes to help him. So he’s forced to take her fireman-style to his cell. He rips his sheets into strips and ties her to the cot with them. Her stomach lifts up and her veins bulge and she makes sounds like she’s about to tell him his mother sucks cocks in hell.

Hmm. So his daughter’s been spending time with this girl Paroxysm and now she’s stuck in an unending seizure. This one isn’t so much of a puzzle. He can feel his underlings looming vulturous outside the cell. He creates a cage of radii and uses craniums for armor plating, places the construction over Amelia, exits, and clanks the thick door closed. “I shouldn’t have to tell you all,” he yells, “but if anyone enters my cell while I am away, I will stick sharpened metatarsals under their fingernails and then turn their tongue into a beautiful new necktie.”

“Sure, boss,” mumble all his henchmen.

And he follows his daughter’s footsteps, the extreme ache of osteocreation and -destruction dulled somewhat by the fury. Stress tingles along his nerves and begs to be bone. This is the closest he can get to drunk. This is the true purpose of Amelia’s presence, he feels: this irrationality, this red-vision disregard for power structures, rivals, whatever. This rule-breaking rage is life in its purest form.

One block down the trail he runs into the Faerie Queene. She’s got a mint aura all round her, caught in dense smoggy patches by lights on their way out. She seems non-magically vacant. One misstep here would equal death: he can sense the misty unphysical space in which the “faeries” “live,” and it is ready to spill. But G.U. only goes, “Give it up. Marquis, give it up.” And stalks past.

He does not, in fact, give it up. A hundred yards later he encounters the witches, lying about glum in their half-undone colorless clothes, and there in the center like the pendant of a necklace is Ms. Pain-in-the-ass herself. Shadows fall across her puffed up face, her greasy stuck-together azure plaits, and shift when she crinkles her features into reluctant fear, like a predator cornered by a species just above, a member of the apex. “It was nothing,” she says. “She wanted it. She wanted me to leave. But he fucking disappeared and didn’t leave a hole behind. I don’t know how. It doesn’t make sense. It just . . . doesn’t make sense.”

When she moves to stand Marquis lets go a latticework of antlerish branches of bone, which shoot in a flash through her slender neck and don’t stop there; they curl enmity-powered into whorling, arcane characters set stark against a growing darkness, a rack to make a buck blush. Her comrades stand on guard but of course they understand his immunity. He steps over to check his handiwork: a mess of sparkling red framed by an elegant eggshell trim, all counterbalanced by blunt sharp shapes of white lacquer and shining diamond blue — and he spits on it, which seems to upset the picture’s delicate equilibrium. Then he returns to his daughter.

He undoes the straps and holds her still himself. “Shh, darling,” he says. “It will get better. You will get better. You will find another. I will help you.” He brushes the hair from her spooked-horse eyes and thinks: if not for this hair I wouldn’t know her at all.

And our shattered unseeing, unhearing Amelia is left to seize and shriek forever in her father’s long hate-hot arms. . . .

**X - Epilogue**

Saul Sorghum wakes shivering in a B.C. cave. He screams and rips free from his own misplaced skin. The girl Paroxysm told him a nonsensical story then blew him up. He finds light at the end of the tunnel and stumbles out onto a landscape painted with some green but mostly white. White and white and white for miles. He treks through the freezing thicket going bluer and bluer till he tips over ten yards from a road. Hunters pick him up just in time. They get him to a fire and toss some hot cocoa down his throat. Once recovered they ask him what’s up. And he says he has to get home. “Well, shucks, Saul — where’s home?”

He explains in vague terms the issue of his not having a valid identity here, and they turn him onto a trucker willing to smuggle him into the States, and — taking some convenient pity — spot him the cash. He sleeps between pallets of soft drinks. Soon enough the gruff girl at the wheel is telling him this is as far as she goes (somewhere just outside Seattle). 

So what else is there for it but thumbing. Is that what they call it? He stands at the side of a highway and sticks his right thumb skyward and waits and waits. Someone in a pink buggy finds mercy, and this kicks off an eleven-day stretch of Saul relying on the kindness of strangers to get back to Mom and Dad, during which the average caloric intake per day is somewhere around five hundred. His thoughts come sluggish and apathetic. It was a nightmare but now it’s over. There is warmth waiting for him. What he doesn’t know is that his original body has experienced brain-death on Huskster’s gynecology table. 

It’s Monday when he goes over the G.W. Bridge. He walks streets lined with sooty snow to the address he remembers from nervous pre-sleepover lectures. Once he gets there he sees Mom coming the other way, and he ducks behind a doorman to watch her. Someone stops her in front of the door. It’s Saul. Mom hugs Saul. Our Saul starts to sob and walks in the other direction. There’s one last thing to check. 

It’s quite the journey but his legs have lost all feeling. The wind off the river almost caves his chest in completely. It’s noon when he arrives, and — some relief at last — he sees the Whitney is not made of his limbs. He’s glaring up at the tower when someone gets in front of him and says, “Saul? I _thought_ that was you!”

It’s old high school friend Jimbo Plank. “Oh,” says Saul. “Hi.”

“I was just going into the museum. Wanna join me? I’ll pay for your ticket.”

Sauls says okay, and follows Jimbo up through the air-conditioned exhibits. Jimbo tells him about how awful his internship at the Pentagon was. Saul nods and stares at a painting of a rose in a noose, then says he has to find the bathroom and heads for the balcony.

It’s too cold for most but there is one pair out there. Two women chatting: one of them is a squat forty-something with a familiar shape, and the other — it can’t be! But it is: Amy Dallon in smart skinny jeans and turtleneck, glowing with youthful vigor, smiling. Well, surely it isn’t Dallon here. Saul chuckles. He goes over to the edge and stares at the screeching street. He considers jumping. The Hudson coughs up a corpse.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously the Paroxysm in this doesn't resemble at all the Paroxysm Amy describes to Yamada in her Ward interlude, but then again she lies a lot in that conversation.


End file.
